Category: Reviews

A brief introduction to Elevator Repair Service’s aesthetic: performance of a found text, in this instance oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc. The case was argued in 1991, and concerned an Indiana statute that regulated go-go dancers in nightclubs and the like: a dancer was required to wear pasties and a g-string. Two South Bend clubs and three of their dancers brought suit, claiming the right to perform completely nude, citing First Amendment protections.

Whether you stand with the State or with the nightclubs on this issue, either before seeing this performance or after, hardly matters. The first two-thirds of the play is a whirlwind of citations and closely reasoned legal points, beyond the ken of a layman. It is precisely executed, retaining every harrumph, um, and disfluency (a lawyer’s fumbled “communicamating” is a happy accident). Ben Williams, in a distinctly unflattering wig, makes us sympathetic for the nerdy prosecutor from Indiana, Mr. Uhl.

Gradually, the play leaves realistic portrayal behind, commencing with a ballet for rolling desk chairs and culminating in a fantastical, graphic display (one could call it gratuitous, but what does that mean, in this context?). The battling lawyers do raise an interesting ontological question, certainly underscored by ERS’s performance: what is the difference between a depiction of conduct and the live performance of that conduct?

The justices display razor-sharp imagination: one of them speculates about an “adults-only car wash.” Justice Antonin Scalia gets off some of the best one-liners, among them a reference to the “Good Taste Clause” of the Constitution.

• Arguendo, by Elevator Repair Service, directed by John Collins, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

What kind of play is this? Well, it’s a good one, yet one that’s difficult to capture in complete sentences. My notes mostly consist of single words or phrases, among them “quiet,” “rich with time,” “waving back and forth,” and “arrogant? elegant?” But we can describe it as an autobiographical attempt by the writer Toshiki Okada to engage in a dialogue with his own younger self by 15 years, as he braids together his response to Thoreau’s Walden, the survivalist visions of the Japanese architect Kyohei Sakaguchi in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and Björk’s second album, Post.

The ensemble of five takes turns portraying the playwright himself (as well as a cranky Thoreau and a loosely-screwed-down Sakaguchi), but it is Dito van Reigersberg who perhaps best catches the essence of Okada as a diffident, Japanese Bob Newhart (simile thanks to OTC). With a gesture that suggests either the scrawl from Tristram Shandy or the last flight of Challenger, van Reigersberg indicates the “trajectory” of Okada’s career. Rachel Christopher spends a good chunk of her stage time simply reading Walden and taking notes, but her expressive eyes tell an eloquent story nonetheless. Ephemeral.

• Zero Cost House, by Pig Iron Theatre Company and Toshiki Okada, directed by Dan Rothenberg, Clarice Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Md.

A carpenter’s workshop, and not one too tidy or sturdy, reveals a broadly played, stirring production of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved romantic comedies. One might call the production “mixed media,” in the the Athenians are played by live actors, while the fairies are larger- or smaller-than-life puppets—or at least actors with some measure of mechanical augmentation. Oberon is realized with no more than an outsized head and arm; Titania sports a peacock’s tail of wooden planks manipulated by the ensemble. The shape-shifting Puck, managed and voiced by three actors, is an assemblage of spare parts: an arm basket, some hard tools, and a garden sprayer.

It turns out that the devices of puppetry and the magic of fairyland work well together. It’s easy to disappear from the sight of men when you want to: just lower your fairy accoutrements to the side. Those planks get a workout: played as a xylophone they can summon a rain-kissed lullaby; held upright, they can become an impenetrable forest; and when lowered again, they can effect an astoundingly instantaneous transition into act III, scene i. And “O Bottom, thou art chang’d!” swoops in with a cheeky steampunk contrivance that is quite indescribable. Some of the effects don’t sit that well in the Ike’s wide expanses: those of us sitting house left had sightlines sometimes obscured by a workshop ladder.

How does Shakespeare fare in all this? Rather well, if the company does feel the need for ad libs to make sure that we get all the jokes. Colin Michael Carmichael is the bossiest, most abusive Peter Quince that I’ve seen. Miltos Yerolemou, when he’s not covering Bottom, does well with the thankless role of blustering Egeus (also known as Exposition Dad). Naomi Cranston gives us an engaging, high-energy Helena. The fight between Helena and Hermia is successful; the mechanicals’ play in act V runs a little long (but that’s the case in almost all productions).

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, Bristol Old Vic in association with Handspring Puppet Company, directed by Tom Morris, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

A fine showcase for the talents of Ronnie Burkett, the piece presents interlinked stories that center on a rooming house at the end of the world. For the most part told with marionettes, with a brief excursion into hand puppets, the stories’ central figure is Penny Plain, an elderly blind woman who has seen it all and is ready for what comes next. The work is by turns broadly satirical, darkly gothic (echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and stereotype-pushing farcical. There are three, maybe four, talking dogs: Hickory Sanchez, a chihuahua with an outsized ego and a sex drive to match, is a particular guilty pleasure.

Burkett’s puppets do things that you don’t expect marionettes to do, like walk with a Zimmer frame, or slouch unladylike in a chair, or engage in the gallows humor of cracking jokes about dog meat. Burkett keeps his two- and three-character scenes snapping with rapid cue pickups, so rapid that sometimes his voice characterizations are a bit blurred. His voice does him better service in monologues, as when we meet a milquetoast of a bank teller who breaks the rules and advises his favorite customer to withdraw all of her money, NOW.

The device of the rooming house, which enables all sorts of eccentrics to drop in (or barge in) wears a bit thin. But on the whole, it’s an enjoyable experience. Don’t bring the kids.

• Penny Plain, produced by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, created and produced by Ronnie Burkett, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Washington

Kathleen Turner is the headliner in this fine presentation of Brecht’s fable with music, but what is going on all around her in the Fichandler that’s just as interesting. Force of nature that she is, she can’t pull this show all by herself, even if her Mother Courage does try to pull that cart by herself. (In this production, that iconic closing image seems to get short shrift.)

David Hare’s crisp translation skates the line between jaded and glib; his “War is like love: it finds a way” crackles. The snappy music, by the multi-talented James Sugg, is outstanding: making no virtuosic demands, it tells the story, plain and simple, relying on accordion, low brass, and “found instruments” like a musical saw, and performed completely by the cast without added musicians.

This is a show that isn’t afraid to let the wires show. While generally cleaving to a design consistent with the play’s seventeenth-century setting, modern safety equipment for dangerous stunts is in full view, vocalists are (modestly) miked, a tuba player who needs a little help has his music on a stand, and the rubber wheels on that cart would not be out of place on a moon rover.

The musical centerpiece of the first act is “Each Night in May,” a violent tango (designed by David Leong) for Meg Gillentine as Yvette; Jack Willis’s salty, torch-bearing Cook stops the show in the second half with “Solomon’s Song (You’re Better Without).”

• Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Hare, directed by Molly Smith, composer and music supervision by James Sugg, movement by David Leong, Arena Stage Fichandler Stage, Washington

Theresa Rebeck’s waspish comedy is a nerdish treat for the New Yorker set. Four desperately young, aspiring writers hire industry veteran Leonard for a series of private coaching lessons in the art of fiction. Leonard (here played by Marty Lodge [and we are so glad to see him again on Round House’s stage], in full command of the rainbow of timbres that he can summon from his baritone) offers his students equal measures of tough-love criticism (more accurately, verbal abuse), access to insider connections, hard-nosed advice (“[fellow] writers are as civilized as feral cats”), and ridiculous ramblings about his various Hemingwayesque adventures. Martin (Alexander Strain sporting eyewear from Jonathan Franzen’s optician) is both the most talented and the most self-censoring of the four, each of them unique in the bundle of self-delusions they carry around.

We forgive the exigencies of theater that call for someone to assess a short story after skimming four or five paragraphs; to spend more time than this would derail the play’s momentum. If the work doesn’t achieve greatness, it does accomplish what it sets out to do, and it’s “good, even,” in Leonard’s hyperjudgmental words.

• Seminar, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

While there’s a lot to enjoy and appreciate in this post-modern piece, a play about the making of a play about a particular genocide in specific and enormous inhumanity in general, it overstays its welcome. Actors improvise props with found objects (snapping a letter-box shut to simulate a gunshot is especially effective); improvise scenes and break character to argue the authenticity of a theatrical moment; find the humor in an admittedly glum topic; and like good Brechtians, chant the preposterously long, tautological complete name of the work, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915.

It’s in the play’s constant second-guessing of its genuineness, its refusal of its own rights and abilities to portray, that it falters. A young black man, who has never been to Africa, challenges any white person’s legitimacy to present something other than he is not. And he is contradicted in a powerful turn by Peter Howard, a middle-aged white actor, as a wizened black African woman, crossing race and gender lines at a stroke.

When the work’s closing sequence finally arrives, a harrowing scene of violence in all its universality, we’ve already been distanced from this skilled ensemble of six by too many presentational gimmicks. It’s like a Lum and Abner play-acting bit that spins out of control.

This is not meant to dismiss the calamity that befell the Herero (perhaps more accurately known as the Ovaherero), who were nearly decimated by their German colonial rulers, years before Armenians died, decades before Hutu and Tutsi slaughtered one another in Rwanda.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work is most effective when it is quiet and specific: a simple, lethal scene with one herdsman, one border guard, one imaginary fence, and one pantomime gun.

• We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, directed by John Michael Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

It may sound like faint praise to lead with compliments on the tech work, but the (uncredited) hair design for The Lyons is quite impressive. The razor-cut bob sported by Rita (Naomi Jacobson), bleached with the roots long grown out, tells us a lot about this grasping, reality-denying soon-to-be widow who bemoans the upholstery in her home as a “washed out shade of dashed hopes.” Her lonely, sad, self-destructive son Curtis (Marcus Kyd) wears a gravity-proof Tintin foreshock that is perhaps his most endearing quality.

Nicky Silver’s powers of invention in the realm of acidulated comedies of broken families are still strong. Granted, John Lescault’s dying patriarch Ben, confined to a hospital bed for the entirety of act 1, doesn’t get to do much but make up for the lifetime of swear words he’s never uttered until now. But director John Vreeke gives him a delicious slow comic take in reaction to a piece of deadly information revealed: who knew that a bed elevator could be funny?

Vreeke also gives Kimberly Gilbert’s Lisa (Ben and Rita’s other child) the time to let us see how shaken she is by her father’s imminent passing. In a monologue not always performed, done as an entr’acte under the house lights at the lip of the stage, Gilbert attends an AA meeting and receives the audience’s greeting. When the ultimate telephone call interrupts her story, her crushed, silent reaction is show-stopping.

• The Lyons, by Nicky Silver, directed by John Vreeke, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

The Smith Center changes up from its usual high-minded puppetry programming into something that’s just rubbery good fun. Blind Summit presents, in bunraku style, the character of Moses. Moses is the collision of a gravelly working-class British accent, a stretchy cloth body out of Tex Avery, and a head made of corrugated cardboard with a craggy face that looks like it should be on some country’s currency.

With hints of Beckett (Moses’s world is limited by the featureless dining room table that he stands on), in a rambling, irreverent monologue of 75 minutes, he tells the story of the Biblical Moses’s last hours on earth—more or less. Acting out multiple parts (the Hebrews on the plains of Moab, God swimming in his firmament) in an improvisational style that sometimes wanders on to less-than-successful side tracks, Moses cracks up the audience, his three puppeteers, and even the techs working the board at the back of the Kogod’s intimate black box. Yet Blind Summit achieves stirring effects with simple means: the puppet’s head has no moving parts above the swivel of its neck, so all of its emotions flow through the tilt of the head, quiet shifts of focus, and the reactions of its manipulators (Mark Down, Sean Garratt, and the extra-bendy Irena Stratieva).

But it’s that super-bouncy body that drives the physical comedy. You’d think that we’d be over the gag of George Jetson bounding off a runaway treadmill. No, we’re not: it still does its magic.

• The Table, by Blind Summit Theatre, directed by Mark Down, Clarice Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Md.

Fake cicada noises introduce Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate, a graceless drama of three Arkansas-raised siblings and their in-laws squabbling over the ruined estate of their recently-departed father. Fights with nasty words in the first act become physicalized in the second, a farcical battle royal of no import—stop me if you’ve heard this one.

This play’s Belle Rive is a plaster-shedding failed bed and breakfast; the legacy of the three children—Toni, Franz, Bo, and rebarbative every one—is a pile of debts and some quite disturbing Jim Crow-era artifacts. The only character who is in any way grounded is Franz’s fiancée River (Caitlin McColl), and even she is called upon to unnaturally overreact to her discovery of a nearby graveyard and to misunderstand her boyfriend’s past dalliances with minors—until a convenient turning point in the plot.

“Oh my God! What am I doing here?” one character cries in the course of the evening. Indeed.

• Appropriate, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups. Todd Scofield brings a yearning strength to the role of Tom, new stay-at-home dad and craftsman, while Will Gartshore is charmant as Jean-Pierre, the hunky French physician. Michael Glenn wisely does not overplay the (many) annoying sides of the feckless Alan. James Kronzer’s double revolve keeps the play’s many changes of scene moving quickly and smoothly. Directory Ryan Rilette does well by keeping Lise Bruneau pinned to the floor for her late monologues as Jane; seated on a step, her grief and pain are the more powerful.

• This, by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

Woolly once again reconfigures its performance space (thereby confusing its volunteer ushers) into a gallery configuration: two suburban tract houses (in a first-ring suburb of a mid-sized American city) face each other across their backyards. The design sets up an anticipated closing-scene effect that is less than spectacular, but it does provide a backdrop for some interesting film projections, accompanied by Christopher Baine’s sound, that cover the numerous scene transitions.

The misdirect in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit is that it is less to do with any broken suburban dreams (despite the somewhat misguided lobby collateral) and more to do with self-destruction and self-deception—what your mother calls “lying to yourself.” Danny Gavigan and Gabriela Fernández-Coffey are quite good as Kenny and Sharon, both of them fresh out of rehab and scratching for respectability and financial stability. Gangling Kenny, who gives us some great cringes in response to neighbor Mary’s (Emily Townley’s) play-by-play on her plantar wart surgery, speaks a working class dialect of indeterminate origin that nevertheless reminds me of a certain colleague’s natural voice. The desperation for conventional normalcy in the voice of Fernández-Coffey’s Sharon is palpable.

Sharon and Kenny backslide, pulling Mary and husband Ben (Tim Getman) along with them, and narrative track falls off the table. In the coda, company member Michael Willis looks newly trim and distingué.

• Detroit, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Why is it that I am so drawn to this powerful, murderously funny play? Maybe it is the third act, a capsule salmagundi of 250 years of musical theater and Greek tragedy, heavily salted by American pop culture.

Or perhaps it is the heart-breaking passage in the first act, in which survivors of an apocalypse (one that has disabled the electrical grid and scrambled nuclear power plants) exchange information about missing loved ones, paging through address books in ritualistic alphabetical order. As playwright Anne Washburn says in an interview with Tim Sanford,

I don’t think I thought about this directly when I was writing that scene but I was in New York on 9/11, and I was fascinated by the group-mind which followed the event…. People were desperate to seize on an order, and a way of doing things. I think I was also thinking of the fliers which went up, with the names and photos of the missing—for the first day or so they seemed like a practical idea, and they proliferated like mad. After the first day they continued to go up, but they felt like an increasingly desperate gesture, and like memorials, rather than a real way to find someone.

By comparison with the Washington version last year, in this production the characters feel a bit less actorly, more like the ordinary schlubs they are, who find themselves amid the broken shards of civilization, compelled to continue telling stories. Sam Breslin Wright, as the taciturn Sam of the first act, gives us a wonderful Mr. Burns in the third, with an evil whine that seems to come out of Jack Nicholson on meth. Matthew Maher is dead-on as Homer Simpson in the “How are you, Mr. Thompson?” scene, mastering Homer’s gormless eye take. And I hope someone finds a Diet Coke for Susannah Flood’s wired-up Susannah: she deserves it.

The orchestration for act 3 is more elaborate, to the best of my recollection. We hear a nice combo of piano, percussion, guitar, accordion, and (the too often overlooked) toy piano. But one wonders how the play’s survivors have keep all these instruments in good working order for 75 years.

Set designer Neil Patel fashions the “Cape Feare” houseboat out of a flat and some repurposed safety railing. The paint on the walls of the second act warehouse, seven years disused, is great: somewhat like Oscar Madison’s sandwiches, we can’t tell whether it’s green paint peeling to battleship gray and brown, or gray oxidizing to green. And the closing lighting effect, designed by Justin Townsend, is astonishing.

• Mr. Burns, a Post-electric Play, by Anne Washburn, music by Michael Friedman, directed by Steve Cosson, Playwrights Horizons, New York